Archive for Scott Fitzgerald

Rev up your motors, Wisconsin, you've got missing computers, subpoenaed Republicans, and redistricting issues to contend with. The subpoenas are being used to force GOP officials to reveal where the mystery computers, external hard drives, discs and documents are located, and the groups who are making these demands want the answers under oath.

It's been months and months, but the state of Wisconsin never told the plaintiffs, who want to search said computers, where the computers were, and made every effort to block them from finding out, so now the Dems are playing hardball. They want those documents, and they want them now.

Groups involved in a long-simmering legal fight with Republicanshave subpoenaed Assembly Speaker Robin Vos(R-Rochester) and other officials in an attempt to track down computers they want to search.

The move came a week after a panel of three federal judges ordered that two sides and the state quickly resolve their differences. The groups sued the state in 2011 over election maps drawn by Republicans, but for months the case has focused on documents that were improperly withheld from the plaintiffs.

For five months, the plaintiffs have been seeking to forensically search computers used for redistricting to find out why they did not receive documents that were supposed to be turned over to them and to learn if any other records were improperly withheld. So far, they have not been able to learn where the state computers are located, let alone search them.

The groups involved are asking why these records were withheld, and exactly how many records were there? Republican Governor Walker, along with the Republican-controlled legislature, approved redistricting maps that benefited their party in a big way. So what else is new, right? Especially in light of Scott Walker's fascination with the new RNC-backed plan to rig blue state electoral votes in favor of future GOP presidential candidates.

Democratic and immigrant rights groups sued, and in 2012 a three-(federal) judge panel ruled that the way two districts were drawn had violated Latinos' voting rights, so they made some changes.

We here at TPC have written endlessly about the myths of voter fraud and the attempts at voter suppression through enforcement of Voter I.D. laws.

As Think Progress noted, "voter fraud is rarer than getting struck by lightning — they are potentially having their right to vote stripped away... Many citizens don’t have immediate access to their birth certificate or similar documents required for a voter ID."

A lot of people don’t have a driver’s license, or live too far from a provider to get one, or are too ill to travel or stand in line (some states even require one for absentee voters), or simply can’t afford the money it takes to access the required documents.

Attempts to disenfranchise voters are thinly veiled efforts to stop left-leaning voters from casting ballots. Those who would be affected most by these laws are low income voters, the elderly, young voters, minorities, and as stated above, the ill who can’t leave home, and anyone without transportation... and these groups usually tend to vote Democratic.

Which brings us to the Wisconsin recall. Per the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board ( GAB), not only was there a very low error rate for the signatures collected for the Scott Walker recall petitions, there were also low rates on the petitions for state senators Fitzgerald, Wanggaard, Moulton, and Galloway.

While only 931,000 signatures were submitted, slightly short of the one million claimed, the GAB disqualified only 30,000 from the Walker recall, and about 34,000 from the Kleefisch recall. The three percent error rate is significantly below the 15 percent rate predicted by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It was also dramatically below the 30 percent rejection rate for the one million signatures collected for the referendum to reverse SB-5, the Ohio collective bargaining measure, in 2011. [...]

The GAB review showed the True the Vote allegations of massive problems to be false... Five "fraudulent" signatures were found... but joke signatures are hardly likely to come from proponents of the recall. [...]

The recall election in Wisconsin is scheduled for May 8th, which can't come soon enough. But, if more than one candidate from a party runs, then that election could become a primary election. Then, the general election would be moved to June 5.

Meantime, Gov. Scott Walker has been stuffing his pockets with all kinds of Koch brothers cash.

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